Public education is on the ropes in this country not because we aren’t spending enough money on it, but because the lion’s share of it goes toward a huge administrative overhead where we pay people eighty grand of taxpayer cash a year to come up with a level system for “things that totally aren’t guns, but may be shaped that way.”

Day One of the government shutdown. Park rangers are furloughed. The fires from the grizzly bear riots are painting the night sky over Yellowstone bright orange. Bald eagles are ditching their tracking collars and skipping the country. WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END

***

Wednesday:

Day Two of the government shutdown. They have begun to tear up roads and dismantle all the utility wires. The garbage trucks sit by the side of the road, abandoned. We are freezing in the dark and can’t go anywhere. THANKS, NRA TEABAGGERS.

***

Thursday:

Day Three of the government shutdown. Marauding Canadians are crossing the unguarded northern border in large groups. For now we can placate them with hockey shirts and cheap LASIK, but I fear the worst.

The supermarket has no food left. Without anyone to tell them what size apples are safe to sell, they didn’t want to risk killing us all. At least SOMEONE is looking out for us.

***

Friday:

Day Four of the government shutdown. Without the FCC, everyone on TV and the radio is just screaming random obscenities. In the next town over, people drank raw, unpasteurized milk, and everyone died screaming.

Because there are no more grocery stores, we tried to go out to eat last night. Restaurant was gone. Some fool installed a bathroom urinal with unapproved water throughput and blew the place up when he flushed. SERVES HIM RIGHT, I SAY.

Let’s see where the Swiss court system could have possibly gone wrong, and play “spot the error”:

A 39-year-old man close to his physical prime, with a history of several violent rape offenses, gets to leave the prison for court-approved therapy.

The therapist they assign to him is a young, attractive female.

The rehabilitation therapy sessions take place at an equestrian center, to which the young, pretty therapist drives the offender without any police escort or other chaperone.

On the way to the equestrian center, they stop at a knife store, where the convicted rapist has been cleared to purchase a hoof scraper knife, to be used for care of his therapy horse.

Instead of a knife suitable for hoof-scraping, the violent rapist purchases a knife better suited for cutting and stabbing.

They never arrive at the equestrian center, and the body of the therapist is found a short time later near Geneva, her throat cut.

Sending a known violent rapist out for reintegration therapy with only a pretty female therapist and then allowing him to purchase knives? Holy shit, Switzerland. I grew up in Germany, so I know a lot of “judicial offender mollycoddling” stories, but this one takes the cake.

How do they treat alcoholics there? Letting them drive to their therapy sessions in a car where “Rehab” plays on repeat, then allowing them to stop at the liquor store (“…but remember, only buy a bottle opener!”), and having them escorted by a giant anthropomorphic martini glass?

I doubt it’s going to keep him from trying to shoulder his way back to the public trough in the future. People like Weiner or Eliot Spitzer don’t really have any other qualifications or employment prospects. I mean, would you hire a guy whose judgment gland is so obviously defective or missing?

That’s some stunning overconfidence right there. Doesn’t even have his pilot license, has only flown a single-engine Cessna a few times, and takes a twin out at night in IFR conditions, with predictable results. He may have had a few hours in a flight school 172, maybe even soloed one, but Twins are a little trickier to handle than single-engine planes, and they are much less forgiving of pilot error. Three lives snuffed out and a perfectly good Piper Twin Comanche turned to charred scrap metal, all because of teenage hormones switching off good judgment.

One guy in the comment section probably has it right when he predicts that the owner of that Twin Comanche will get sued by the families of the deceased teenagers, for failing to adequately secure his bird against unqualified kids flying off with it.

I avoided looking at the display model iPhones on the way in, and averted my gaze from everyone elses iPhones. I wanted to enrich the experience of opening my own iPhone 5, and make it more special than it already would be…

You know you’re a pampered, entitled little whiner when you go to buy a new iPhone and feel compelled to write a tear-soaked blog post on how the AT&T rep “ruined” your first impressions of the phone by carelessly unwrapping everything prior to setting it up. ZOMG! He didn’t leave the protective film on it so I could peel it off in a quasi-religious trance! He unwrapped my USB cord so I was deprived of the experience! WAAAA! This is followed by a list of “How To” tips that outline how the experience should have gone. (In this kid’s ideal world, the salesguy should practically avoid eye contact and treat you like you’re in a bank opening a precious lockbox.)

The folks at the phone store don’t have the time to let every customer spend fifteen minutes ritually unpacking and getting to know their new iPhone. On iPhone launch day, these places are wall-to-wall with hipster kids looking to pick up their new phones between hitting Starbucks and pretending to go to class. You don’t want to make them late for their Ethnic Basketweaving 101 class so you can smell the packaging on your new iPhone.

Dumbass of the Month award goes to this guy, who taped himself going 180+ MPH on a busy Canadian highway on a motorcycle.

Runner up is the dumbworm who made this comment on the CNN intertubes site:

“Aaah…how, exactly, was a guy on a motorcycle going to kill anyone? Most likely case: he crashes into a car, and he dies.”

Physics knowledge FAIL. A 400-pound bike with a 200-pound rider going 180MPH is a metric fuckton of kinetic energy. Anyone unlucky enough to be rear-ended by that moron at those speeds would have had a very bad day indeed. Imagine an anvil getting shot out of a cannon and plowing through an occupied minivan from back to front.